Part 1: The Long Road

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Corey McCue has seen the worst of the fight for Kandahar, and the best. A 25-year-old combat engineer based in Petawawa, Ont., he is completing his second combat tour in three years. By the time he comes home in July, he will have served almost 600 days in theatre, more than half of them “outside the wire,” living rough and traveling hard. He has experienced two different wars.

Canada’s combat mission in the Afghan province ends formally in ten days. Canadian troops have lately been winning small but important victories, taking far fewer casualties than before, opening new rural roads and schools, and feeling confidant they are making improvements and accomplishing their tasks. But Cpl. McCue remembers another, bloodier conflict. A war that was being lost.

He first laid eyes on this battle-scarred province in September 2008 as a member of Operation Athena, Roto-6. At the time, it was obvious to rank and file soldiers and officers alike that Canada’s military and civilian objectives – to free Kandahar from Taliban violence and threats, to establish capable, local security forces and governance, and to rebuild the province’s crumbling infrastructure -were falling short. From what he could see, “everything was falling apart,” Cpl. McCue recalls.

This was not an isolated opinion. Morale among troops had plummeted. “My men don’t want to come back [for another tour],” one grizzled captain told me several months before Cpl. McCue and his battle group arrived. We were standing inside a remote Canadian-held forward operating base west of Kandahar city. The captain was exceptionally candid. He had already claimed that some of his men were being blamed, unfairly, for handling a detainee improperly. Now he was charging they were all “scared.”

“It’s fucking dangerous out here,” said the captain. Standing beside us was a full colonel. The colonel showed no surprise. He expressed no chagrin. It wasn’t news to him.

Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan was then in its seventh year. The first Canadian troops –elite special forces members — deployed quietly in December 2001, three months after Osama Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorist network had launched its devastating attacks on the United States. The Canadians conducted clandestine operations aimed at capturing or killing al-Qaeda fighters and their Afghan brethren, members of the Taliban. Regular infantry soldiers were sent forward in 2002, and a year later, almost 2,000 troops were deployed to Kabul, to help secure and rebuild the Afghan capital. This was the first rotation of Operation Athena, Phase I. It wasn’t a “traditional” peacekeeping effort, but to many back home, it seemed to fit Canada’s perceived role as a reliable contributor to international relief and security efforts.

The operation’s second and more controversial phase began with a battle group deployment to Kandahar, early in 2006. Canadian soldiers — most of them from 1st Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry — were suddenly in the crucible, responsible for a multinational counterinsurgency campaign in a land of tribal complexities that none claimed to understand, in a physical setting they didn’t recognize, fighting an enemy they struggled to distinguish from peaceful men.

Their war — Canada’s war — had begun.

By the end of 2006, 36 Canadians had died on the battlefield in Kandahar. By the end of 2007, another 29 Canadian soldiers were dead, and an officer in Kabul had committed suicide. Dozens more losses would follow: Lost lives, and lost opportunities. Chaos, mistakes, denials, scrambled facts, anger. Pessimism and confusion, in Kandahar and at home.

Finally, near the end, there were better moments, real accomplishments and even hope. Canada’s efforts in Afghanistan aren’t over, but the most difficult phase has ended. Was it worth the sacrifice, the spent treasure, the pain and the burden put on soldiers and their families? And did Kandahar benefit? To find answers, we return to the scene, to a story that began long before Cpl. McCue first arrived.

Kandahar Airfield, December 2006: Momentum that Canadian troops had seized early in their combat mission was now stalled. Initial battlefield victories, most notably Operation Medusa, a spectacular September 2006 drubbing handed the Taliban by Canadian and other coalition forces in key Kandahar districts of Panjwaii and Zhari, had come undone. While an estimated 500 insurgents were killed during the two-week combat phase of the operation, compared to just five Canadian fatalities, the Taliban quickly reinforced their presence in the two districts. “The Taliban filled back in,” a Canadian officer acknowledged at a December 2006 briefing with reporters embedded at Kandahar Airfield (KAF). The officer put insurgent numbers in two key districts – Zhari and Panjwaii, west of Kandahar city -at 900, greater than Canada’s own troop strength in the two districts.

“Medusa,” he admitted, “did not achieve post-kinetic objectives.” And the Canadians had fallen back on their heels.

There weren’t enough Canadian forces or Afghan National Security Forces [ANSF] on the ground in Kandahar to beat back Taliban fighters, who streamed into the province from training centres in Pakistan. Insurgents came to Kandahar, season after season, and year after year. They considered the province their turf; this was the movement’s birthplace and spiritual home. The International Security Assistance Force, the NATO-led coalition military response to al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, had not mustered an adequate response. Military analyst Carl Forsberg summarized the situation in a report he prepared for the Institute for the Study of War, a U.S.-based non-partisan think tank. “Despite Kandahar’s military and political importance,” he wrote, “ISAF failed to prioritize the province from 2005 to 2009, allowing much of the population to fall under the Taliban’s control or influence.”

Just before Christmas 2006, the Canadians led another large operation in Zhari and Panjwaii. The operation dubbed Baaz Tsuka, or Falcon Summit, was intended to bring material assistance to the local population and disrupt Taliban activities in the two districts. Principal targets were so-called tier-two Taliban, local men of fighting age, most of them poor and illiterate and attracted to the insurgency by the promise of money. ISAF’s plan was to hand them shovels, picks and wheelbarrows, in the hopes they would abandon the insurgency. They would also be offered positions in a new paramilitary outfit, the National Auxiliary Police, described at the time as a kind of armed neighbourhood watch.

The operation went ahead as scheduled and was over by the new year. Logistically, it was a success. Taliban forces had decided not to engage their adversaries; they remained inside walled residential compounds in the two districts as Canadian soldiers unloaded five sea containers filled with hand tools. These were distributed in the two districts. As well, about $50,000 in cash was distributed to local elders, to be used to entice the half-hearted among them to commit to the Afghan government side.

The other objective — to persuade the tier-two Taliban to put down their arms — was not achieved. Few dared abandon the Taliban, let alone leave to join the National Auxiliary Police. The program was soon abandoned. And hard-won territory in Panjwaii fell to insurgents in the new year.

By then, the Taliban’s battle space had changed. Their fighters launched fewer direct attacks and ambushes on well-equipped foreign fighters. Not because they were outmanned; they often had the numeric advantage. Canadian troops were stretched notoriously thin. Each 1,200 member battle group rotation was responsible for securing all of Kandahar, a province similar in size to Nova Scotia. This mean that prior to 2009, the Canadian Forces could spare only two infantry companies – about 180 soldiers – and a small tank squadron to patrol and secure Zhari and Panjwaii districts, where the Taliban had concentrated. Other battle group companies and elements were responsible for protecting districts to the east, to the southeast, and to the northeast, reaching well beyond Kandahar city.

But the Taliban were no match for Canadian guns and tanks, nor the 500-pound precision bombs that American aircraft were prepared to drop on them from the air. By 2007, insurgents relied mostly on quick-and-dirty surprise attacks using small arms, rocket propelled grenades, and home made bombs. In the rural countryside, where most Canadian troops operated, the Taliban found their greatest success planting deadly improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. Using parts sourced from Pakistan and Iran, insurgents buried the bombs under footpaths, roadways, in mud walls and in trees. They were detonated using simple remote controlled devices, or by compression. Toor Jan, a former Taliban commander in Panjwaii, recalled that the “IEDs were fantastic. We would plant them in areas where we knew the foreign troops were coming, and when they came we would just blow them up.”

By the time Cpl. McCue deployed to Kandahar in September 2008, the combat mission had claimed 87 Canadian lives; 42 of the deaths were the result of IED blasts. Nine more Canadians would be dead by the year’s end, all of them victims of IEDs. And in the following year, 32 Canadian soldiers involved in the combat mission would die; all but three were killed by IEDs. (The figures do not include four Canadians killed by U.S. friendly fire during a training exercise near KAF in 2002, and four Canadians killed in other parts of Afghanistan between October 2003 and November 2005, prior to the start of the combat mission in Kandahar).

“I think 2008 was a big step back,” acknowledges Lt.-Col. Michel-Henri St-Louis, commander of Roto-10, the last Canadian battle group to deploy to Kandahar. Lt.-Col. St-Louis arrived in theatre last fall, under very different circumstances, but like every Canadian soldier he was acutely aware of the problems that battle groups had already encountered.

LOSING HOPE

In Kandahar city, insurgents continued to focus on “soft targets” such as Afghan civilians, government workers, elected officials and police. Security remained a distant dream, as did promised improvements to infrastructure. Electricity was sporadic across the entire province. Due to a chronic lack of power, factories sat closed. Unemployment remained high. The public’s frustration boiled. Ordinary Kandaharis – almost a million Muslim men, women and children, most of them illiterate, waging their own battles with disease, poverty, corruption and internecine tribalism – had no love for the Taliban, whom they regarded as tyrannical and cruel, but they remained suspicious of foreign troops and viewed many local government officials with contempt.

About 10,000 internally displaced peoples, or war refugees, were camped north of the fighting zone and in Kandahar city. The refugees were being ignored; international aid money meant to alleviate their conditions and their suffering was being diverted into the pockets of corrupt Afghan officials. The camps had become prime recruiting zones for insurgents.

In 2007, the Canadian Forces hired a polling firm to survey Kandaharis; one question asked was whether they felt “relatively safe” in their communities. A little more than half of respondents answered “yes.” A year later, they were asked the same question; only 25% answered in the affirmative. Brigadier-General Denis Thompson, who commanded Canadian troops in Kandahar in 2008, acknowledged to the National Post that “people’s perception of security has had its legs cut out from underneath it. And that is a result of a change in Taliban tactics. They have gone from being in your face in 2006 and earlier to doubling up the number of improvised explosive attacks and acts of intimidation, such as splashing acid in the face of schoolgirls or executing the deputy chief of police from Kandahar province.”

Violent crime remained a concern. Civilians were being targeted by kidnappers. Sometimes, police were involved in abductions. In July 2008, the Taliban blew open the gates of Sarposa Prison, an archaic penitentiary on the outskirts of Kandahar city, with a massive truck bomb. All 1,000 inmates – including an estimated 400 insurgents – escaped.

The crime wave continued; so did Taliban-led intimidation and murder. Some community leaders began to express frustration with the situation, at the lack of security and at the scarcity of resources and jobs. There were hardships and atrocities under Taliban rule, they agreed, but daily life was even more difficult under the elected national government led by President Hamid Karzai, himself a native of Kandahar. “The Taliban were bad, but they weren’t corrupt,” a Kandahar city university teacher and businessman named Aman Kamran told me in 2008. That wasn’t true; the Taliban had filled their own coffers with profits from the sale of opium, until international pressures forced them to stop poppy production in 2000.

Mr. Kamran made a lasting impression. A native of Kandahar, he had left during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s and worked for years in New York. He became an American citizen. Like thousands of other Kandaharis, Mr. Kamran returned to the province after the Taliban were removed from power. He hoped to build a thriving business and something like a normal life. That didn’t happen. When we met, he had almost lost hope. “Kandaharis have two faces,” he said ominously. “We have been showing our sheep face. Don’t force us or pressure us or we will show our wolf face. Once frustrated enough, the general public will pick up arms. They will wage war on the government and coalition forces responsible for this mess.”

Kandaharis questioned the coalition’s motives and commitments. Why would rich men and women from the West put their lives on the line for some farmers in Panjwaii? And how long would they stay? Canada’s counterinsurgency objectives – winning the battle for local hearts and minds, separating insurgents from the population – were not lost, but they weren’t being won. As for defeating the Taliban, something the Canadian public thought was the goal? That had never been in the cards, admitted Brig.-Gen. Thompson, on his return from Kandahar.

“In a counter-insurgency there is no VE Day and there is no ticker tape parade,” he told the National Post. “There is none of that. It just slowly withers and dies. You don’t defeat an insurgency. You marginalize it. You bring it to the point where it is forced to become just a political movement and then they are just the opposition.”

AT THE HEART OF THE ENEMY

Cpl. McCue paid little attention to the politics of war. Like most enlisted Canadian soldiers deployed for the first time to Kandahar, his understanding of local life and customs was minimal at best. He was posted to Forward Operating Base Sperwan Ghar, as remote a place as he could have imagined. An old Soviet-made mound of dirt and sand, it sits like a giant anthill in the middle of Taliban country, about 30 kilometres west of KAF, on a triangular peninsula called the Horn of Panjwaii. About 160 square kilometres, the Horn is the movement’s traditional seat of power.

FOB Sperwan Ghar was the only significant Canadian position in the Horn when Cpl. McCue landed there in 2008. It was constantly under enemy fire. Helicopters routinely took small arms fire when they flew into Sperwan Ghar. Insurgents could creep into firing position just outside the FOB’s walls. Private contractors hired to chopper supplies to Canadian troops in the Horn would eventually refuse to land at Sperwan Ghar.

The dirt road leading into FOB Sperwan Ghar was riddled with IEDs. “My first day in theatre, we dealt with an IED in a culvert, right on the road out front,” Cpl. McCue recalls. “It happened once or twice again after that. The same culvert. There were walls on either side of the road, and the enemy could get right up to the culvert and do their thing, without anyone [in the FOB] noticing them.” The fields surrounding the FOB were also mined.

Despite the dangerous terrain, Cpl. McCue and his mates conducted regular foot patrols; these “dismounted ops,” he recalls, would last one to two weeks. Sections of about ten men walked west from FOB Sperwan Ghar towards a small village called Mushan, near the tip of the Horn where two rivers converge and the Panjwaii district ends. The patrols were meant to demonstrate their presence in the area, and they often led to searches inside suspect dwellings and compounds. Soldiers knew they were also meant to provoke the enemy. “Every time we went west of Sperwan Ghar, we’d get in a fight,” says Cpl. McCue. Always. “We knew that when we went past that [specific position] on a map, we were getting into a fight. It happened every time…We were provoking. The officer in command, he wanted that, but he wouldn’t say ‘let’s go out and pick a fight’.”

Cpl. McCue and his mates could not see the point. “There was definitely an objective for every operation we went on. But, as for the purpose and the outcome, it was almost like there was no hope. We just didn’t know what we were fighting for at the time. It felt like a lost cause. A lot of guys were getting angry, frustrated. We were clearing routes of IEDs, and finding lots. We were winning firefights and coming out with no one injured. Everything we trained for, we did, and we did it really well. But it just seemed we were doing it for no reason.”

Things would get worse. Early in 2009, Cpl. McCue was part of a group posted to a small police substation (PSS) that Canadian engineers had built in remote Mushan. “We went out there to patrol and to build a helicopter landing pad,” he recalls. PSS Mushan was one of four police substations that Canadians had assembled in the Horn over the previous winter. Meant to establish a permanent, visible presence in Taliban-dominated areas and to try and keep open the one road running the Horn’s length, each PSS was manned with Afghan National Police officers and up to eight Canadian mentors, soldiers attached to special groups called Police Operational Mentor and Liaison Teams (POMLT).

Conditions inside PSS Mushan “were pretty shitty,” says Cpl. McCue. “It was falling apart. There was mud everywhere.” The little fort was exposed and offered soldiers minimal protection. Delivering basic supplies – food, water and ammunition – to the four police substations required a massive military effort. Convoys of 70 vehicles or more had to travel dangerous roads or along the Arghandab River bed intersecting the Taliban heartland, on three-day resupply operations. I traveled on one of those journeys in early 2008; despite taking precautions, our convoy hit an IED along the way. On that occasion, no one was killed but a vehicle was destroyed.

PSS Mushan was probably the last place any Canadian soldier wanted to be. In fact, none of the four police substations – built inside villages at Mushan, Talukan, Zangabad and Hajji – were helping secure the Horn of Panjwaii and separate insurgents from the local population. There was a familiar expression in Kandahar: If you don’t stop for a policeman, he will shoot you. If you do stop, he will rob you.

The piecemeal forts were putting people in harm’s way, attracting Taliban fighters like moths to a flame. That was obviously not the intention, says Maj. Eric Landry, an armoured squadron commander from the 1er Bataillon, Royal 22ieme Regiment, based in Val-Cartier, Que. In late 2007 and early 2008, Maj. Landry, then a captain, was the Canadian Forces’ chief military planner in Kandahar, responsible for conceiving operations across the province. “The idea was to put these little pieces of infrastructure along an existing road, that at the time we called Route Foster,” recalls Maj. Landry. “We would maintain that road and put local police along it. We thought that just that presence would increase security. The assumption was that we would patrol around those substations to the point that our zone of influence in the Horn would grow bigger and bigger, and these police substations would connect, and the whole road would be open. But it didn’t work as much as we thought it would.”

The Canadian presence in the Horn was “too risky,” Brig.-Gen. Jonathan Vance acknowledged later. Brig.-Gen. Vance led all Canadian troops in the province, as commander of Task Force Kandahar from February to November, 2009, and again in 2010. “We didn’t have enough resources,” he said. The police substations were of “no use, no value. An island of [coalition troops] that had a 300-metre patrolling radius, and every time we did one of these river-run convoys we risked losses. For what? Nothing.”

All four police substations were dismantled; PSS Mushan was the last to go, in May 2009. The tear-down operations involved hundreds of Canadian and ANSF troops but they were kept quiet; reporters embedded with Canadian troops in Kandahar weren’t initially informed because the withdrawals could only have been perceived as a negative. The Canadians and Afghans who had operated from the substations were posted elsewhere and the territory around them was ceded to insurgents.

While members of the Canadian Forces refused to call the withdrawals from the Horn a defeat, there’s no question they were significant setbacks. “They had to be,” reflected Lt.-Col. St-Louis, commander of the last battle group to deploy to Kandahar. “It fed into the insurgents’ story that the government of Afghanistan, the security forces of Afghanistan, with the coalition, cannot help you, cannot deliver on the promise of security.”

But rural folk living in the Horn of Panjwaii expressed relief they were gone. “We were living in fear when the [Mushan] fort was there,” one local landowner told me in May 2009. “The Taliban would attack it, and of course the Canadians and Afghan [police] would react. Civilians suffered casualties.” With the troops gone, insurgents were “walking round freely and with rifles,” he added. The Horn was lost, for the time being.

THE SURGE

The situation was grim across most of Kandahar province. Institute of the Study of War research analyst Carl Forsberg noted that by mid-2009, “the coalition could rarely hold ground and often avoided the areas of greatest importance to the Taliban…[Taliban] Sanctuaries in Zhari, Panjwaii, and Arghandab supported bomb-making and IED factories, allowed the basing of insurgent fighters and the organization of complex attacks, and were used for shadow courts to which the Taliban would summon Kandahar City residents.”

Within the city itself, Mr. Forsberg continued, “the Taliban conducted dramatic attacks on Afghan government targets and undertook an assassination and intimidation campaign to dissuade the population of Kandahar City from supporting or assisting the Afghan government.”

But help was coming, from the United States. More U.S. troops were on their way to Kandahar Airfield, already the largest military base in Afghanistan and home to some 15,000 soldiers, private contractors, maintenance and service workers from more than a dozen nations. An American troop surge that began in summer 2009 would continue well into the next year. KAF’s population would double.

U.S. Army engineers and contractors on KAF added more housing units, more mess halls, more airfield capacity and a new, $35 million hospital, a state-of-the-art facility made of bricks and mortar that, like the rest of the new infrastructure, seemed meant to last a very long time.

For Canadian soldiers, however, time was running out. Their “military presence” in Kandahar was to have ended in 2009, but Conservative and Liberal members of the House of Commons voted to extend the mission to 2011. This was a remarkable victory for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, since the war was unpopular at home, and the mission’s purpose and objectives were not well understood. Canadian soldiers were dying at a faster rate than soldiers from other nations involved in the conflict, a discouraging fact that the public recognized and even resented. Reports circulated that insurgents captured by Canadian soldiers were routinely abused by Afghan authorities.

The public’s confusion and anger were considered by an independent government panel, chaired by former Liberal Cabinet minister John Manley. It reported to parliament in January 2008 and from that sprang a Special Committee on the Canadian Mission in Afghanistan.

Tasked to examine the conflict and file quarterly, public reports on the mission to conclusion, the parliamentary committee did not mince words. The mission had run into difficulties, it recognized. Moreover, Afghan society was barely advancing. A committee report filed early in 2010 was typically frank. “The Taliban insurgency gained strength and influence throughout 2008 and most of 2009,” it read. “In Afghanistan, profoundly serious issues remain. The death and destruction of the last 30 years has deeply traumatized all parts of Afghan society. Afghan institutions at every level lack capacity, transparency, and accountability.

There is a desperate shortage of teachers, doctors, nurses, and professionals of every kind. Violence and insecurity, among other factors, make it hard to recruit such people in the geographical areas that need them most. The necessary work of reconciliation has proven slow and politically contentious. Corruption is widespread and corrosive. These circumstances exist in the context of a continuing and pervasive insurgency…The objective of ensuring an Afghan state capable of ending internal conflict and providing basic services to its people will clearly not be met before the end of 2011.”

Such conclusions came as no surprise to Canada’s military leaders. Endemic corruption and lack of political capacity and leadership in their own area of responsibility, Kandahar, had impaired their own counter-insurgency efforts and had jeopardized the safety of their own troops. The Canadian public was tired of the stalemate in Kandahar; so were Canada’s most senior military officers, who knew where the real problems lay.

The problems did not rest with their men and women in theatre. From 2006, Canadian soldiers had proven themselves more than capable in their combat role. Their training was excellent and their conduct in battle extraordinary. But the condition and the quantity of their equipment was inconsistent; it ranged from excellent to inadequate. It was no secret that their battle group numbers were insufficient for an area the size of Kandahar.

Looking back at the period from 2006 to 2009, a senior Canadian officer concluded that troops “dealt with the worst military threats posed by the Taliban. We managed. We didn’t lose, but we didn’t win. Some would argue, and I would agree, that we sometimes made things worse.”

But the American surge had a profound and positive impact on the mission. By summer 2010 an additional 30,000 U.S. troops – more than 100 times the number of Canadians in theatre – were deployed in Afghanistan; many of these troops were spread across Kandahar province and in Kandahar city. The surge allowed Canada to concentrate its area of operations to just two districts: Dand, immediately south of the city, and Panjwaii, the perennial battlefield to the west.

CANADA’S LAST BATTLEGROUNDS

The two districts are an interesting study in contrasts. Now synonymous with the Taliban, Panjwaii is fertile and agricultural; most of its 30,000 inhabitants depend on farming for their livelihoods. The landscape is divided by walls demarcating villages, family compounds and fields, and by myriad irrigation ditches and dirt tracks. The tight grid-work pattern make perfect terrain for guerrilla warfare, especially in the verdant summer, as it offers plenty of ground cover to insurgents on foot and creates one obstacle after another to conventional land forces mounted in armoured vehicles.

Dand, on the other hand, is arid, open, and sparsely populated. Although the Taliban have launched attacks on troops there, it is not a major insurgent base and has presented fewer challenges to Canadian soldiers. Dand’s district governor – a position equivalent to the chairman of a regional municipality in Canada – is Hamdullah Nazik, an affable, educated man in his thirties whom coalition soldiers and senior diplomats trust. Compared to Panjwaii, Dand is an oasis of calm.

But by March 2009, “the district was about to fall,” recalls Brig.-Gen.Vance, who commanded troops in Kandahar that year. The Taliban had managed to attack Dand’s district centre, a walled government compound where Mr. Nazik worked and where limited public services were offered to locals. Most of the infrastructure was destroyed. The successful insurgent strike on the district centre signalled again that Canadian troops and their Afghan partners did not provide blanket protection.

To restore local confidence, Brig.-Gen. Vance redoubled Canadian efforts in the district. He conceived of an ambitious reconstruction and rehabilitation campaign that would initially see the shattered district centre restored and improved, with more government services offered there, and physical improvements made to a village called Deh-e-Bagh. The district centre and Deh-e-Bagh would be presented as models of progress, positive examples of what might be accomplished should Afghan elders in other settlements put their faith in coalition troops and work with them, rather than submit to Taliban threats.

Brig.-Gen. Vance hoped to expand this “model village” approach program across the district and then into Panjwaii. He enlisted the help of an American military professor and counterinsurgency expert named Thomas Johnson. This was an interesting choice; Prof. Johnson was already a fierce critic of the U.S. military’s approach to counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. He notoriously compared the war against the Taliban to another counterinsurgency, one waged a generation earlier in Vietnam, and he dismissed a large British and American-led operation in the province of Helmand as “essentially a giant public affairs exercise, designed to shore up dwindling domestic support for the war by creating an illusion of progress.” He was no fan of the country’s president, Hamid Karzai. Prof. Johnson would characterize President Karzai’s August 2009 re-election as “rigged” and “a disgrace.”

To independent observers of the war in Afghanistan, this was a refreshingly honest and informed perspective. It was also completely at odds with the official ISAF view; one never heard, for example, a Canadian general in Kandahar disparage either the coalition’s efforts or the Afghan president, at least not in public.

But Brig.-Gen. Vance was obviously impressed with Prof. Johnson. He invited him to Task Force Kandahar headquarters at KAF, and together they designed the new Dand district strategy.

Roads were paved and solar-powered street lamps were installed in Deh-e-Bagh. The district centre was refurbished and a courthouse was built. Security rings went up around other district villages and population clusters, and infrastructure was rebuilt to improve economic development and governance.

But the Taliban did not throw down their arms and concede. In September 2009, insurgents attacked a Canadian convoy as it traveled near Dand’s district centre. One soldier was injured when his light armoured vehicle (LAV) was stuck. As it happened, Brig.-Gen. Vance was close by in another vehicle. He immediately called a meeting, or shura, with local elders. According to Canadian Press reporter Bill Graveland, who was also on hand, the general was furious.

“It disgusts me that my soldiers can be hurt,” Brig.-Gen. Vance told the elders. “If we keep blowing up on the roads I’m going to stop doing development. If we stop doing development in Dand, I believe Afghanistan and Kandahar is a project that cannot be saved.” Brig.-Gen. Vance said he expected the local population to cooperate with coalition and Afghan soldiers, and to report suspicious activities. Elders nodded their heads as if in agreement, but as always, it was impossible to know where their confidence lay.

Insurgent attacks continued in Dand. In late December 2009, four Canadian soldiers – Sergeant George Miok, Sergeant Kirk Taylor, Corporal Zachery McCormack, Private Garrett Chidley – and Calgary Herald reporter Michelle Lang were killed when the LAV in which they were traveling was hit by an IED. A reporter in Toronto tracked down Prof. Johnson and asked him to comment on the deadly incident. “I’m shocked that the bombing would have happened in Dand,” he said. Then he raised the obvious: Insurgents, he said, “might have had an explicit objective to discredit the Canadian model village project.”

Attempts were made on the district governor’s life; all of them failed but a dozen village leaders in Dand were reportedly assassinated. Yet security in the district had noticeably improved by summer 2010. Some Afghan acquaintances of mine, local men who had refused to travel into Dand the previous year, suddenly determined it was safe. For his part, Brig.-Gen. Vance was determined to show that his counterinsurgency formula was working. “They’re actually dealing with the finer points of political assembly in Dand right now,” he insisted, during an August 2010 interview with reporters embedded with his troops.

A few weeks later, he invited three of us on an excursion into the district centre. After a meeting there with American soldiers under his command, Brig.-Gen. Vance announced he was venturing outside the walled compound for a stroll. He removed his body armour; until then, I had never seen a Canadian soldier – let alone the most senior officer in Kandahar – do such a thing in the open. We followed suit. We walked outside to a freshly paved intersection, and we stood there, completely exposed. A crowd of villagers formed around us. Some local children challenged a pair of soldiers to a foot race. Off they all ran, arms flailing, hats flying, the children screeching with delight.

I’d first come to Kandahar in 2006; this was the first time that I had sensed any real hope.

Bigger changes were to come. In September last year, U.S. and Afghan forces launched major campaigns in Zhari and Panjwaii districts. These represented the final phase of a three-stage operation designed to secure the most populous parts of Kandahar province and to push the insurgency there to the brink. Dubbed Hamkari, the Pashto word for “cooperation,” the operation launched in June with the establishment of Afghan police road checkpoints around Kandahar city. These were intended to prevent insurgents from entering the city; in practice, they didn’t work. Then came an American-led clearing operation in Arghandab district north of the city. This battle was hard fought and longer than anticipated; the Taliban mounted a stiff challenge but were ultimately handed a defeat. U.S. and Afghan troops held the territory they had cleared, and attempted to win over local families who had suffered their own losses during the fighting.

A similar scenario unfolded in Zhari, where U.S. and Afghan troops fought the Taliban from mid-September to October. Some of the district was cleared, but not all; parts of Zhari remains under Taliban control. Phase Three in Panjwaii then kicked off, with U.S. special forces, U.S. infantry, and Afghan National Army elements entering the Horn and taking the key villages of Zangabad and Mushan. The village of Talukan, in the middle of the Horn, was claimed last. Meanwhile, Canadian troops protected their hard-won positions in eastern Panjwaii, in villages such as Nakhonay, Salavat and Chalghowr.

Demoralized by their defeat in the Arghandab, battered in Zhari, and with much of their local leadership killed off by U.S. special forces, the Taliban barely mustered a fight in the Horn. Their sanctuary was taken with relative ease. But more work was required there, and more troops. The Canadians knew the terrain. They were going back, this time with renewed purpose.

THE LONG ROAD

Former operations planner Eric Landry returned to Kandahar in late November, this time in command of a 60-person tank squadron, an element of 1er Bataillon, Royal 22ieme Regiment. Maj. Landry’s legendary “Vandoos” had the honour and burden of leading Canada’s last battle group in Kandahar. They were motivated by opportunity: Finish the long and contentious combat mission on a high note.

Conditions looked their best since 2006. Maj. Landry figured he’d barely be tested. “I thought I was going to come and sit here and once or twice a month do a little operation, attach a group of tanks to the infantry, and not really be in charge of anything,” he recalled later. That’s not how things went.

The Taliban had melted away, but they hadn’t left. Supply routes in the Horn remained exposed and under IED threat. American soldiers still holed up in Zangabad, Talukan and Mushan “had no road access, no ground lines of communication, and had to be resupplied by air,” says Maj. Landry’s battle group commander, Lt.-Col. Michel-Henri St-Louis. “They were maintaining their presence in the Horn from a pretty tenuous position. They were waiting for us to arrive.”

ISAF headquarters in Kandahar worked on a solution. On November 28, Lt.-Col. St-Louis was handed his mandate: Build a wide road, from a point north of FOB Sperwan Ghar and running westward, through Mushan and beyond, into the very tip of the Horn, where the Taliban still moved freely. Build across farmers’ fields. Knock down their grape and poppy field walls, and, if you must, knock down their houses. Arrange for their compensation. Pave the road, all 14 kilometres. Create connecting routes to coalition and ANSF positions at Zangabad and Talukan. Get started now, and have it all finished before the summer fighting season.

Lt.-Col. St-Louis delegated this “daunting task” to his young tank squadron leader, Maj. Landry. “It was a big deal for us,” the major recalled. “We were going to push into the Horn. It was the biggest challenge of our lives. So I was ecstatic. And I was nervous. I knew it was going to be complicated, and I wasn’t trained to do it.”

Maj. Landry had never overseen construction of a road before, but he had helped plan an earlier road project in Panjwaii. It was meant to tie the largest village in the district, Baazar-e-Panjwaii, to FOB Sperwan Ghar, a few kilometres to the west. An offshoot of Operation Baaz Tsuka, the project was started in early 2008 and abandoned that summer. “The assumption was that we would employ 400 local people and take away their temptation to join the insurgency, by handing them picks and shovels,” Maj. Landry recalls. “The idea was good but it went way too slow. We paved 1.5 kilometres in four months. We dedicated too many resources to it. I think it was just too time consuming.”

The new road would have to be better and safer. Maj. Landry and his team members went straight to work. He had to get the local population onside. “We first had a big meeting at the [Panjwaii] district centre, where the people gave me all their ideas for the road and what it should look like,” recalled Maj. Landry. The farmers wanted the road to follow Route Foster, which bends and twists and runs through or close to their main villages. But this wasn’t at all what ISAF had in mind. Compromises had to be reached, and negotiations took time.

Meanwhile, American troops were leaving Zangabad and replacements were needed there. Lt.-Col. St-Louis deployed 150 of his Vandoos – A-Company – to the village, where conditions were typically austere. The Americans had been encamped in an old school compound, which the Taliban had used as a command centre and as the seat of their shadow government and court. “That’s where we set up,” says Lt.-Col. St-Louis. “For the longest portion of our tour, we occupied the insurgent’s symbol of power in the Horn. The guys were bedding down in the courtyard of the school where five months prior, Afghan villagers who co-operated with ISAF were hanged. And they would be left there, as deterrents for other Afghans not to co-operate with the ANSF and the coalition.”

Captain Gabriel Benoit-Martin and a 40-member platoon he commanded were the first Canadians to arrive. “It was in a sad state,” he says. “The Americans had left and we found a few [fresh] booby traps, some IEDs.” But the local “pattern of life” in and around Zangabad, was, “surprisingly good,” Capt. Benoit-Martin recalls. “We thought it would be hell on Earth, but the locals were very happy to see us.”

The roadwork commenced in December. Maj. Landry’s team was supplemented by Americans, a crew of Puerto Rican combat engineers, plus Afghan contractors hired to do the road paving. They built 200 metres of road at a time. Armoured vehicles first cleared a path, and the route was shaped, graded, and gravelled. The paving came last.

The new road — called Route Hyena — was nearing completion when I visited the site two months ago. The men had endured freezing winter temperatures, spring flooding, blazing heat. Spiders and snakes. But these were minor hardships.

Everyone on the road was exposed to insurgent attack and to IED strike. The Vandoos suffered an early casualty. On December 18, Corporal Steve Martin was conducting a clearance operation next to the road, at a point between Zangabad and Talukan. He walked around a walled compound. There was an explosion. Cpl. Martin was killed by an IED. He was 24.

In March, the village leader — or malik — was killed in a suicide attack launched from the bazaar. Two civilian truck drivers were also killed. Two Canadian soldiers and five Americans were wounded.

When I visited, Afghan civilians paced warily on the roadside. Some were armed with machine guns and grenade launchers. They were private civilian contractors, hired to protect the Afghan road paving crews. Gravel trucks lined the route; many of their windshields were shot through with bullet holes.

“We’ve found minefields everywhere,” Capt. Adam Siokalo, the tank squadron’s second-in-command, told me, as we stood on a segment of freshly paved road, metres from where Cpl. Martin had died. “We still have [enemy] contact almost every day. Most of it is harassment fire from grape fields, places without road access. It’s hard to get at them when they are shooting at us from the fields. But we’ve also found lots of their caches, weapons, mortars, guns, and ammunition.”

We continued heading west, towards the end of the road. Into Mushan, which I had last visited in 2008. We were to stop there, but Capt. Siokalo received a report warning of a possible suicide attack. We pushed ahead another kilometre, and met up with a small Canadian reconnaissance squadron. A small group of soldiers were camped at the side of the new road, watching for enemy activity. This was a lonely, exposed spot. We didn’t linger.

We moved instead to the end of Route Hyena, where all progress stopped. On one side sat an empty white schoolhouse, its walls etched with drawings: Helicopters, scenes of war. Next to the empty school was a guard tower, manned by a handful of Afghan National Civilian Order Police, an elite unit of officers. They looked west, towards the narrow tip of the Horn and the furthest reaches of Panjwaii district. In that direction, they said, are more Taliban. Beside the guard tower sat a 60-tonne Canadian Leopard 2A6M tank from Maj. Landry’s armoured squadron. As long as it remained there, its cannon pointing west, we were safe.

I thought of the men and women who have died along this route, behind it, and beyond it. I thought of the soldiers who have survived their tours, and of those who have returned to Kandahar, once, twice, three times. Returning soldiers such as Corey McCue, who has seen the very worst of the mission, and, at the end, its best. “I’m not saying I’m really tough or anything, but what guys were doing in ’08 compared to what guys are doing now, this is a breeze,” Cpl. McCue told me back at KAF. “And going all the way down to the Horn like that? That road is pretty much saying to the Taliban, ‘In your face.'”

But he’s leaving. The Canadians are leaving. American troops and equipment are now filling in the space, but they won’t stay forever. When will Afghans be able to protect themselves and defend their fragile, teetering country? The end of the road is just 40 kilometres from Kandahar city, the Taliban’s holy grail.

bhutchinson@nationalpost.com

All illustrations by Richard Johnson, National Post.
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